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The economists can’t keep up

The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday morning that a stunning 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance last week. The consensus expectation among economists, as Yahoo Finance notes, was 3.76 million claims.

Temperature check

“Kinsa believes the only way to curb a pandemic is to know where it is happening in real time,” writes CNBC’s Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato. “The San Francisco-based health technology company was launched in 2012 to help stop the spread of infectious illness—in particular, the seasonal flu—through earlier detection and earlier response. Their means? An internet-connected smart thermometer, paired to a mobile app, which aggregates consumers’ temperature and symptoms data.”

By filtering out the baseline number of fever spikes that occur during a normal flu season, Kinsa can figure out how many of the national total are likely due to the coronavirus—and it can pinpoint where those probable pandemic-related spikes are happening. Bloudoff-Indelicato reports that the company just announced that it’s sharing its “illness insights and real-time fever information for free to accredited academic institutions, public health entities and researchers who qualify.” See “Apply for Access to the US Health Weather Public API.”

The CDC’s ad blitz

From March 19 through April 1, PSA messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) got more exposure on TV than advertising from any other brand, accounting for 2.96 billion ad impressions, or 1.04 percent of all TV ad deliveries during the period measured, according to iSpot.tv data shared exclusively with Datacenter Weekly. iSpot has been tracking CDC ad placements both nationally and locally. Some 16 percent of the CDC’s impressions have been generated at the local-market level as it aims to customize messaging to different coronavirus hot spots.

The top networks for CDC PSA ad deliveries: NBC, ABC, CBS and TNT. Morning news shows, movies, dramas and reality programming are among the programming genres delivering the most ad impressions, per iSpot.

The U.S. Census Bureau has also been a massive advertiser during the same period. Taken together, the CDC and the Census Bureau have accounted for 4.6 billion impressions—1.6 percent of all TV ad deliveries—from March 19 through April 1.

Influential

Plenty of social media influencers have been creatively sidelined by the coronavirus crisis given all the shelter-in-place mandates in states across the country. (There’s only so much compelling content—especially brand-partnered content—that you can generate within the confines of your own home.) But that doesn’t mean they’ve been silent about the pandemic. CreatorIQ, the influencer marketing platform, has been tracking coronavirus-related hashtags across influencers’ social media accounts. From Jan. 1 through March 31:

• Social media influencers tracked by CreatorIQ have generated more than 800,000 posts about the pandemic.

The flight from flying

In “The toll on travel,” Reuters serves up a striking visualization of the dramatic drop in global air travel as the coronavirus crisis has exploded over the past few months. The analysis, which relies on data from FlightAware, starts with a depiction of flight volume on Jan. 23, when more than 15,000 flights departed from or arrived in China. The view from a week later, after the Chinese government shut down Wuhan, shows daily flights dropping below 9,000. And then on Feb. 13, after the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions on flights from China, the number dropped to 2,460.

The Reuters data viz also shows what happened to flight volume in the Middle East and in Europe. See the whole thing here.

Coming up

This section of Datacenter Weekly is intended to highlight upcoming data-centric events, but as we’ve noted the past several weeks, we’ve paused that “community calendar” function as the coronavirus crisis has escalated. For now, we’re directing your attention to Ad Age’s Coronavirus Industry Event Tracker for the latest word on canceled and rescheduled conferences and other get-togethers.

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.